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Historic Streetcars in San Francisco

No.1011

Market Street Railway Company

Built 1948 • Operational • Tribute livery

This streetcar is painted to honor Market Street Railway Company, Muni’s private competitor from 1921 to 1944 and the namesake of our nonprofit organization.
While the paint schemes gracing Muni’s PCC streetcar fleet almost exclusively represent liveries that actually appeared on similar streetcars in cities around North America, this design is a tribute to what might have been, rather than what actually was. It serves to celebrate the days when streetcars competed side by side for passengers on Market Street, and to make a dream come true.
Our namesake, Market Street Railway Company, drew up plans for a PCC-type double-end streetcar in the late 1930s, hoping to move beyond its old-fashioned boxy streetcars to embrace the streetcar state of the art and compete more effectively against Muni. But the financially troubled Market Street Railway had no way to afford new streetcars and the dream died. The best they could do was modify the livery on some of their old-fashioned streetcars with a racy white “zip stripe” slashing across the green side panels along with a bright yellow roof, while retaining the solid white ends patented as a safety feature. That undoubtedly would have been the paint scheme on any PCCs Market Street Railway might have acquired — and that livery can now be seen on the streets of San Francisco, on No. 1011.
While it wears the Market Street Railway “zip stripe” livery, streetcar No. 1011 has actually been a Muni streetcar all its life. It ran from 1948 until 1982 on Muni’s J, K, L, M, and N lines, and was then retired and stored. Badly vandalized while in storage, it has been fully restored by Brookville Equipment Company in Pennsylvania to operate again as a double-end streetcar — wearing colors that fulfills a long-time dream.